


ungentle

by athoughtfox



Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Mentions of Blood, Sort Of, The Problem of Susan, and catches sight of a half-remembered dream, and its aftermath, in which susan grieves, mentions of smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:41:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27560920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athoughtfox/pseuds/athoughtfox
Summary: When people talked about them, they were always the children. The children, as unknowable as birds, foreign as stars, ageless, genderless, undivided. The children, Peter-and-Susan-and-Edmund-and-Lucy, knots on a ribbon. She’s been fighting to untangle herself for years, and now with a policeman’s knock finds herself unstrung.-Love is not a soft thing.
Relationships: Edmund Pevensie & Lucy Pevensie & Peter Pevensie & Susan Pevensie, Edmund Pevensie & Susan Pevensie, Lucy Pevensie & Susan Pevensie, Peter Pevensie & Susan Pevensie
Comments: 6
Kudos: 92





	ungentle

There are no soft gods.

-

When people talked about them, they were always _the_ _children_. The children, as unknowable as birds, foreign as stars, ageless, genderless, undivided. The children, Peter-and-Susan-and-Edmund-and-Lucy, knots on a ribbon. She’s been fighting to untangle herself for years, and now with a policeman’s knock finds herself unstrung. Just Susan, small and raw and lonesome.

-

On the day of the funeral, she can’t get her lipstick even.

-

People said that the dead looked like they were sleeping, but they didn’t.

In that dry sharp light, brittle as a dream (as a dream of a dream), the three of them were laid out together as she’d requested. Lucy, perfect and motionless as a doll. Her brothers with death’s dusty fingerprints all over them.

She had a stinging urge to ask for blankets, so strong it made her breath short. The chilled metal trolleys looked uncomfortable.

Instead, she touched the ashy smear of Peter’s lips. A memory prickled her, a sodden battlefield, the sky hung grey, thick and close, watching. Peter in chainmail and a torn scarlet tabard, tipping into his cold mouth something sweet and bright as copper. The grass beneath them had been black with heart’s-blood. It had stiffened her skirt and dried in the creases of her palms, roped her hair into sticky strands when she’d bent to kiss his cheeks as they warmed, his eyes for seeing again, and she'd tasted iron on her lips when she had offered her thankful prayers. 

What horrible things she’d imagined as a child. She couldn’t even remember the way he must really have looked: sprawled out in the sunlight, young, playing dead.

-

Standing at the podium in black silk, she puts on her speech like a record. Her shoulders are straight and her voice is steady, her silhouette a queen. 

-

On the coldest night of the year, she’d spied Edmund stealing a cigarette from her evening clutch. She’d watched him slip out to the garden to smoke it in the crisp moonlight, which glinted out of the snow like something broken.

She’d had no idea what he was trying to burn away. The shadows took him like an embrace, the cool and slender fingers of the moon grasping weakly at his outline amongst their mother’s flowerbeds, where he stood a stranger in the soundless dark. His breath had bloomed silver and shivering in the air.

The man from the morgue hadn’t understood how important it was that Edmund must never be cold.

-

Her brothers and her sister were nothing like the people who are mourned here today. The pallid lilies, nodding heavily to a sombre hymn, give her a wild desire to laugh. They should have had a lament full and rough as saltwater. Fire, and flowers that grow in no English valley.

-

Isn’t it funny, she’d said, you remembering all those games we played when we were children.

Lucy had looked up, the only one who still packed to go away to school. The morning adored her, like every morning before, its brisk freshness pinching her cheeks red, the sun on her hair so that it glinted like rough-spun gold. She was carefully rolling up her paintings, of lampposts and fauns and lions.

Oh, yes! Lucy had said, her smile full and bright. You were a wonderful queen, you know.

What nonsense, she’d said sharply, the words sour and lumpy. Me, a queen.

There is a thick silence.

But Su, Lucy had said, her voice tight with hope, laying her head on her shoulder like a child, wasn’t it a marvellous game?

-

Love is not a soft thing. It sits on her, heavy as gold, and she feels the shadow of its weight like a crown. 

**Author's Note:**

> originally appeared on my Narnia tumblr, found at the same username.
> 
> The decision to have Susan be a smoker is in accordance with the fashions of the period. Ed's not usually a smoker, but that particular night is his own story.


End file.
